The subject matter of the present disclosure generally relates to an architecture for a Business Service and, more particularly relates, to a system and method of managing a Business Service.
Business Service Management (“BSM”) is a dynamic information Technology (“IT”) management strategy supported by technology, people, and processes. BSM enables organizations to align their IT and help desk operations to business goals and business services. A business service consists of a number of resources, such as management processes, hardware, software, facilities, and people, for example, which help satisfy business needs or objectives. Using a BSM approach, IT staff can monitor, manage, and improve their IT systems and applications that support critical business processes. BSM also enables companies to understand and predict how technology changes will affect their business and how changes in the business affect the IT infrastructure.
As suggested above, one goal of BSM is to assess the impact that problems reported on some resources (e.g., a network router, file server, or database application) may have on other resources of a higher level (e.g., business processes or services). To do that, a special type of “relationship” is used to describe the operational link between two resources: the impact relationship. An impact relationship is created between a first resource identified as the “provider” and another resource identified as the “consumer.” While there may be many different types of impact relationships, all impact relationships represent a dependency from the consumer on the provider.
Modeling a business service is one way to organize the impact relationships between resources. It will be appreciated that a business service can encompass thousands of resources and relationships so that modeling the business service can be challenging. In large computing environments or enterprises, for example, multiple applications may be used to “discover” or detect resources and components associated with the computing environment. In such situations, a single resource may have been discovered and reported to an enterprise's configuration management system multiple times, which can make modeling a business service difficult. In addition, discovery applications may not identify all the resources and/or operational relationships between various resources in the large computing environments or enterprises. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a mechanism to facilitate modeling of resources and relationships of a computing system.
In addition to the difficulties involved with modeling a business service, difficulties occur when changes or modifications are to be made to a model of the business service. Typically, portions of the business service model are stored locally at managers that detect and report events that may have an impact on business processes. These managers are software components distributed throughout an enterprise computing system and are referred to as Impact Managers or cells. To make changes or updates to the service model, a user, such as a network administrator, typically must individually access the portions of the service model stored locally at the Impact Managers and make separate changes at the Impact Managers.
The subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.